Good to be back!
I hope you've had a good week. Mine has been pretty full on, hectic and surreal. The move down to the Sutherland Shire went well last Wednesday, and the past few days have just been trying to settle in and unpack.
I'd expected the actual move to be stressy, but actually the most stressful bits have been since moving. Having a messy house with half unpacked boxes everywhere, with two unsettled kids getting in to EVERYTHING and two short-fused parents trying to do a bunch of things at once has been way more difficult than I thought.
One important lesson I have learnt is to be specific with your box labelling. Oh man, this has been annoying. Writing 'kitchen', or 'bedroom stuff' or 'kids stuff etc' just doesn't really cut it. That first night the kids were screaming hungrily as I opened about 17 different boxes on the hunt for cutlery.
You know what it's like? That card game 'memory'. You see some random thing in some box while looking for something else, but then when you go back actually looking for that thing you passed over, you have no idea which box it was in. And round and round it goes.
Next time, I will be writing up an exhaustive inventory.
Anyway, enough of the griping and moaning.
The place is nice. We love the little suburb, it's so quiet and pretty. It's near the water, and rather than traffic and smog, it's just birds and fresh air. The kids are enjoying the yard, just exploring and playing. It's pretty massive, long and rambly. Gotta get a mower soon though.
Our place is kind of the old run-down place in the nice street. The places around us are a lot flasher. Disconcertingly, yesterday we had surveyors come over taking all these readings for an architect. My guess is that after our 6 month lease is up the house will be torn down and a new, flash place will go up instead. Sad. Still, there's something kind of romantic about being the last people to live in an old place before it disappears in to oblivion.
It's a nice suburb, but I doubt we could afford to buy in it, so over the next few months we'll be looking around the surrounding area on the lookout. It hurts to think we'll be doing this moving thing all over again in a few months, but we'll get there.
Huldra Forsvant (Theodor Kittelsen)
Huldra Forsvant (Theodor Kittelsen)
11 comments:
Sounds stressful! Glad you're all moved in.
I spent the week here: www.hideaway.com.vu - life's tough.
Welcome back! :)
Oh, btw, UK TV is showing season two of Masterchef Australia at the moment! Tonight's episode was about finding the final 24, so I guess it starts "for real" tomorrow. Brilliant!
Yes. Welcome back. I don't think you can be too specific when labelling boxes. Mine go like this - books, middle sized lounge room bookshelf LH side of second shelf...
Happy unpacking.
Oh yes, the labelling of boxes is an artform unfortunately learned after many, many attempts.
My sister and brother in law live in the Sutherland Shire, and it seems good for kids - lots of parks and play areas. There is an awesome pirate ship play area for them down on the beach which I would have climbed on if I wasn't 27.
glad you're all moved in. I agree, after moving into three different places I've realised good labelling of boxes is key!
Ben, Ben, Ben - evidently no-one's told you that you organise to go to a friend's place for dinner or get take-away until such time as your kitchen is functional nor that you always carry the kettle, a picnic basket (with cutlery and crockery) and your choice of poison (tea / coffee / both) in the car.
And if you're going to be moving in 6 months time, consider leaving some boxes packed (do you need to have all your books/CDs/DVDs/glassware/depths-of-winter-clothes out of the boxes?) and getting a mowing service if there's any possibility you'll move into another apartment for the long-term.
Apart from that, have fun finding random things in boxes tacked into those small spaces where a toy will fit but another book won't. :-)
Good to hear your move went well.
Definition of a stressful move = my sister (and her family) moved to Canberra. On the way down their furniture truck crashed and over turned on the highway.
Of course, it did save them from having to unpack as much stuff.
We are missionaries and have an extra nasty labelling issue every time we come home for a year home assignment. Our mission requires we label boxes "To send" and "Do not send". Just in case we don't end up coming back from Australia, so they know what to ship back to Australia. It is a killer - how do you decide something like that for every single thing you own. One thing it does - helps you to minimise your belongings!
Georgina- Wow, looks beautiful!
Traxy- Thanks. Good stuff. We are just getting Masterchef Junior now.
Simone- Thanks. Yeah,there's definitely books and books. They need different labels.
Amy- Yeah, it's weird, there seems to be way more kids around then where we were. It's kind of nice.
Soph- Thanks, yeah I don't know why I didn't realise this already.
Laetitia- E has been asking me whether all those books and cd's need to be unpacked. My answer is always yes. They're like a security blanket.
Maso- oh man, that sounds bad. Still, I had a strange thought when the moving truck took a while to get to our new place. I thought, well if they've nicked all our stuff, would I be THAT sad? There's kind of a lot of stuff I'd be happy to do without.
Wendy- that sounds very complicated and difficult. way out of my league.
Reminds me of our move over to the US. PH was deployed and I was making decisions:
1. what to pack for Christmas with my parents (presents, summer clothes, swimmers)
2. what to pack for our winter holiday on the way to the US
3. what to put into storage in Australia
4. what to give away (plants, herbs and spices, leftover food, etc)
5. what to send by airfreight to the US so that it would be there on our arrival
6. what to send by ship to the US.
I was running around our apartment trying to sort out piles of stuff in different rooms and madly putting stickers on different items to indicate what was to go where as well as keeping a new little walker our of trouble.
All the while hoping that when we finally unpacked in the US, PH wouldn't turn to me and say "where did you put..."
But at least we didn't have to pack it or move it ourselves!!
Aimee, Ben's move sounds simple compared to that. Moving countries and hemispheres is definitely not fun!
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